Has sparkling water come of age?

I am not a princess about many things, but there has to be sparkling water in the house. Refreshing, enlivening and occasionally hangover-clearing, it is an essential. Thankfully, my husband is aligned with me — it would never have worked with someone who answered “Tap’s fine” when offered water in a restaurant.

SodaStreamed tap is fine, but lately I have been seduced by a rainbow of new flavoured, unsweetened sparkling waters such as Dash Water and Aqua Libra. Depending on how you look at them, these drinks offer a healthy take on fizzy drinks and/or bring a bit of bling to an otherwise neutral beverage.

“They make water a fun drink,” says the chef and author Jesse Jenkins, who co-founded sparkling water brand Yew. These drinks are not to be confused with waters to which sweeteners have been added; their packaging universally proclaims “no added sugar”, yet some, like Volvic’s A Touch of Strawberry Sparkling, can be horribly cloying, which risks conflating “water” with something that’s quite sweet.

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